Is resilience a protective factor of internet addiction?

•People who have higher resilience tend to have lower levels of internet addiction.•This holds true for online gaming addiction, but not for Facebook addiction.•The more time spent on these activities, the higher addiction levels tended to be.

Extensive research has focused on risk factors that increase an individual's likelihood of internet addiction. This paper intends to examine protective factors that may reduce the likelihood of an individual to suffer from internet addiction, focusing on the role of resilience. A total of 240 online participants completed a questionnaire that measured general internet addiction, resilience levels, and addictive behavior for online games and Facebook. Hierarchical regression analyses were performed while controlling for age, gender, social class, and hours spent online. It was found that, overall, the higher the level of the participants' resilience, the lower the level of their internet addiction. The same relationship was seen in online game addiction but not in Facebook addiction. Future directions for research on how to experimentally test the effectiveness of resilience on internet addiction were discussed.